How The Lakers Got Lousy: Cautionary Lessons For Companies

Rob Asghar
, ContributorI'm sussing out the true laws of physics of leadership.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. –G.K. Chesterton

The Los Angeles Lakers, with their 16 NBA championships and 31 NBA finals appearances, have long been synonymous with the highest level of organizational excellence. That commitment to excellence manifested in both the frequency and the style with which the team won. And they fittingly became the heroes of a city filled with ambitious transplants who came west to chase dreams of greatness.

But today, the Lakers are plodding through the worst season in their history. And don’t expect things to return to “normal” anytime soon.

From Good to Great … to Awful

The Lakers’ collapse offers some insights into how excellent organizations can quickly slide from the top of the hill to the bottom. Some lessons we can learn:

1. The deterioration process usually isn't as sudden as it may seem. The Lakers’ flame-out seems shockingly abrupt to many observers, and some fans shrug it off as a fluke due to an unusual series of injuries to Kobe Bryant and other key players. But all this followed years of inner deterioration and management’s neglect of an aging roster. They weren’t repainting the post white, and it turned black, to use Chesterton’s terms. For years, the Lakers held themselves together with duct tape and bravado, while other teams, notably the San Antonio Spurs, were aggressively finding top talent in faraway nations that could renew their teams.

2. You’ll always have big egos, so you’ll need a good ego-succession plan. The Lakers had many massive egos at the table, elbowing one another for their share of the spoils. Eventually, some of their biggest talents would find themselves moving on. Longtime general manager Jerry West and former coaches Pat Riley and Phil Jackson come to mind.

Yet big egos are inevitable in any high-achieving organization: All the moderate-sized egos went home at 5 p.m. to spend quality time with their families or friends, while the big egos stayed at the office till midnight obsessively looking for an edge.

The point isn’t to eliminate high-ego people from your organization, if your goal is excellence. It’s better to build your organization so that it encourages a steady stream of high-achieving egos to come through, make their mark and then leave, minimizing their tendencies to become permanently entrenched or to create their personal fiefdoms … because that entrenchment leads to the next problem:

3. Nepotism and cronyism can take a toll. Lakers owner Jerry Buss, who died in 2013, was the most successful owner in pro sports history, with 10 NBA championship rings and another six appearances in the finals. But he botched his most important move: the team’s succession plan. He gave effective control to his enigmatic and unproven son, Jim. Elite organizations don’t do that; so the minute the elder Buss did this, the Lakers effectively renounced their status as an elite organization.

Today, the Lakers are an odd tangle of family dynamics. Jerry’s daughter Jeanie now claims to be the key leader for the Lakers. Yet her claim that “I’m the boss now” has lent about as much assurance to fans as Al Haig’s legendary assertion that “I am in control here.”

If you plan to be part of an enduringly elite organization, succession has to be rigorously meritocratic, especially when family or old friends are involved. Otherwise you fail to renew your organization, and you fail to “always be having a revolution” in the manner that G.K. Chesterton described.

Glory isn't necessarily fleeting, but it's certainly not permanent--even for an organization as storied as the Los Angeles Lakers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

4. It’s about top talent and teamwork. You need talent, and you also need a certain alchemy to make the sum greater than its parts. The Lakers lost sight of this. They built themselves for too long around Kobe Bryant’s singular but selfish game, hoping that everything else would keep falling into place.

Most Lakers fans believe that the team’s fatal sin was to hire Mike D’Antoni instead of bringing back their legendary ex-coach Phil Jackson in 2012. I’m agnostic about this: Jackson is 68 today, the recipient of two hip surgeries and one knee replacement, who can no longer put in the time and energy to turn around a Lakers franchise that’s short on talent and long on injuries and bad luck. It may well have been wise for the Buss family to resist dragging back Jackson for a third stint that probably would have led to failure on the court and disillusionment in the stands.

But if Jackson wasn’t the solution, neither was D’Antoni, a fast-break expert who was a bad fit for a sluggish, aging roster. The Lakers' tolerance for mediocrity at the top, combined with the slow deterioration of the roster, is why the Lakers now look up to the long-hapless Clippers as the dominant basketball team in Los Angeles.

My brother Shabi and I came of age watching and worshipping the Showtime-era Lakers at the Los Angeles Forum, in awe of the franchise’s combination of grit and glory. Today, we go to games at the
Staples Center, located just a few blocks from my apartment, with his six-year-old son, Nicholas, trying to explain to little Nic how things used to be when Magic Johnson was in his prime.